Well, tonight I'm going to try and keep it short and sweet....you see, I am SICK! Last night I started feeling a little under the weather and I've had a sore throat & stuffy head all day long. It didn't keep me from enjoying my day - instead, I was thankful to God that I didn't get sick on my first day!

Today's Civil War tour took us to the Carnton Plantation in Franklin, which is about a 30 minute drive west from Murfreesboro. We really didn't intend to visit there, but after driving around the downtown area for awhile without stopping anywhere, we decided to follow our trusty Rand-McNally map and head out to the plantation. It was definitely worth the trip.

To get to the plantation, you have to drive thru a beautiful residential area with canopied streets and big brick southern mansions. The road (actually, it's a lane - Carnton Lane) eventually splits in two. To the right, is an unpaved road that goes right thru the middle of the plantation's field and takes you to the back of the house and to the visitor's center. To the left, is a private cemetery where 1,481 Confederate soldiers are buried - many of those who lost their lives in the Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864.

Why does that alarm keep going off at 7am?

Oh yeah...this is a "productive" vacation - which means that we have "agendas" and "action items" and "goals"...things of that nature. As far as I'm concerned, we are still on CA time...going to bed at 1am and waking up at 5am. Of course when you put a 4 year old to bed in a hotel room, all other occupants must be quiet and do whatever needs to be done using only the light of the stove hood in our mini-kitchen. Thank goodness for free high-speed internet that allows us to quietly blog into the night. Ok, I'm off track.

Goals....right. So, we had goals whilst vacationing in lovely Murfreesboro, TN. We wanted to get a "lay of the land" as well as look at some potential neighborhoods. In order to do that, we enlisted the help of our TN based real estate agent, Kami Shipman who contacted us (interesting, huh?) after hearing from her BofA appraiser husband that some tech support guy based in Concord, CA (that would be Mike) was interested in TN real estate information. So, we had scheduled some time with her when we planned our trip with the purpose of having her give us a tour of the area and, based on our set criteria, show us some neighborhoods where we could potentially buy.

OK, I'm no blogger...but I'm married to one, so I've learned a thing or two about this business. Since writing stuff like this doesn't come too easily for me, you won't find too many posts from yours truly. But I did want to throw in some quick comments about my take on Tennessee after being here for two days now (yes, I am a Tennessee expert)...before moving on to our really cool field trip today, which Kristin alluded to in her post about today's "festivities"...

Today was our one "all day fun" day...the rest of our time here we have business to conduct, but today was all about seeing some stuff.

We started off the day actually using the kitchen in our hotel room (you know how that goes, "oh yeah - we'll use the kitchen....save lotsa money..." till you get there and find that there's 2 utensils and a pan that looks like someone cooked some tar on it). I cooked up the usual: eggs, toast (today we had "World Outreach Church" jam on our toast - a gift for being visitors on Sunday). I actually used the coffee pot and had a nice cup of joe.

The alarm went off at 7am....

Why?

I don't know, because Mike set it for that not knowing about my diet coke induced insomniatic toss-fest. Ok, I don't even know if that made any sense, but that is what it felt like.

Up at 5am, shower, last minute packing, 2 eggs, a 7am pickup and a quick trot off to SFO in Saturday morning traffic...that was the easy part.

Then...the "malfunction" occurred. Oh yeah - the words you really want to hear when you're sitting in a plane embarking on the first leg of a 2 leg 5 hour journey - "this is your captain speaking.....um.....we're having a bit of a problem with the landing gear".